If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can’t be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don’t know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won’t work.
My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: “Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net/. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances.”
For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.
Browsers are not supposed to be only “html document viewers”. In spec parlance, they are supposed to be agents for doing whatever the user wants to do: that’s why they also offer facilities for passwords, for example.
The fediverse is a bunch of web servers each with the accounts on it. When I am subscribed on instance A and go on an account on instance B, today the browser acts as a document viewer: I can see what the profile wants to show me, hopefully it has a button that properly redirects me but then I leave the context of the message I was looking at.
What I want instead is for the browser itself to offer me fediverse actions: like, comment, reply, directly from where the content I’m interacting with is. I don’t expect browsers to do that soon so the next best thing is web extensions